When Wayne was a Whippersnapper: Rogues' python

By PAUL LOCHER
Staff WriterPublished: August 19, 2012 4:00AM

DOYLESTOWN -- Rogues' Hollow has long been steeped in stories of bizarre hauntings and spirits, ghosts and supernatural goings-on. Those who worked and lived there passed down stories of a headless horse with the devil astride it, picks and shovels that danced by themselves in a mine, twin ghosts, the apparition of an old man with a beard looking in windows, malevolent spirits that burned down houses and so many others.

While those tales are best left to less historical journalistic pursuits, there is one longtime legend associated with the hollow that seems to have been sufficiently verified for inclusion here. It is the story of the famed Rogues' Hollow Python.

In 1905, a local resident named George Matson was driving a team of oxen through a farm field, following a faint trail of wagon tracks in the tall grass. Suddenly the team stopped and refused to move one step further, despite Matson's barking commands at them to "gee," "haw" and "giddap."

Then Matson looked ahead and saw the head of a huge snake reared up above the grass in an alert position. Matson estimated the body to be at least six inches in diameter, with the head larger than that. Matson was eventually able to prevail on his team to go another direction, but he told people in the hollow about the snake, which almost overnight became something of a local legend.

In the summer of 1918, resident Anthony Paridon came across an unusual path about two feet wide through a field of oats near the old Volcano Mine. Thinking a dog might have killed a sheep and dragged it through the area, Paridon followed the unusual path, but found nothing. But a few days later a nearby landowner reported seeing a huge snake he described as a python in the vicinity.

On May 1, 1944, there was a huge commotion in the community when resident Bill Hummel, a U.S. Marine sergeant home on leave from World War II, told a group of loafers in the hollow that he had just seen a huge snake. Members of the group laughed and told Hummel he was just another person seduced by the tales of the Rogues' Hollow Python that had refused to die over the decades.

Nevertheless, they followed Hummel as he tracked the snake, eventually coming to a circle in the field where the grass had been broken and bent in a circle 30 feet in diameter. In the center of this circle lay a huge python that apparently had smashed down the grass in its death throes. The snake measured 13 feet in length and six inches in diameter.

Of course the news created a sensation, and newspapers throughout the region ran stories and photos of it. The reptile was displayed in a service station in Barberton for more than a week, until health authorities demanded it be buried.

Source: "Rogues' Hollow History and Legends" by Russell W. Frey

Monday: Wayne County once cabinetmaking center

Reporter Paul Locher can be reached at 330-682-2055 or plocher@the-daily-record.com.